What do you mean God speaks?

S2E1: Beyond the questions that confront Genesis

September 02, 2021 Paul Seungoh Chung Season 2 Episode 1
What do you mean God speaks?
S2E1: Beyond the questions that confront Genesis
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

The narratives told in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, especially the account of God creating the world, form the framework in which the Christian Bible and its message is set. However, many of us today are at a loss as to what these narratives mean for us. So, we will begin our second season by exploring the primeval history in Genesis.   (Genesis 1 ~ 11)          
              -
02:10 -  The place of Genesis narratives in Christianity      .
07:30 -  Genesis Creation account and modern scientific cosmology        .
13:25 -  Questions Christians raised about Genesis Creation account        .
17:26 -  God "accommodates" to human understanding       .                          

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Creation; Paradise; Fall; Flood; Babel. These are the narratives of how our world came to be, and why it is the way it is now, according to the book of Genesis. Yet, most of us nowadays struggle with these accounts. And it’s not because they are hard or complicated; they are stories that can be told even to children.

And that’s the problem. When compared with our current knowledge of the world, these accounts in Genesis, from Creation to the Flood, sound rather like children’s stories to many of us living today—the most prominent case being the first account, of God creating the world. And that’s why the main question we’ve been asking about Genesis in the last two hundred years has been whether or not this account is compatible with modern science.

Yet, I think we fail to recognize the significance of the ideas that Genesis presents, because most of us no longer know how the Jewish and Christian thinkers have engaged and grappled with these narratives. Their understanding of Genesis was more diverse and complex than we imagine, and they’ve delved into its depths, because of the glimpses of foundational, timeless truths that seemed to be woven into the seemingly simplistic stories it presented. 

And ultimately, following them will lead us to the world inhabited by those who lived in the days when Genesis was written… and to God who spoke to them

[ music / ]  

So, let’s begin our second season here.

Welcome to "What do you mean, God speaks?" where we explore important ideas, insights, and stories in Christianity for the skeptics who want to understand religion, Christians who have questions about their own beliefs, and everyone-in-between. 

I am Paul Seungoh (Chung), the author of God at the Crossroads of Worldviews, and this is the first episode of the second season, "Beyond the questions that confront Genesis."

[ / music ]

The first step is often the most important: the first question of a scientific inquiry, the first set of laws that founds a society, the first scene of a story, or… the first episode of a podcast series. It sets the direction and frames the rest of the content that will follow. And so it is with Genesis, the first book of the Bible, and especially its first, opening narrative of God creating the world. It is merely 34 verses; yet, it is arguably the most influential passage among all ancient writings. Even within the Bible, it is frequently referenced or quoted—in the psalms, the prophets, the New Testament Gospels and epistles. It forms the foundation of every biblical narrative that follows; we live in a world created and ordered by God—with the capital “G,”— and it is this God that the human protagonists in the Bible encounter and interact with, generation after generation. And Creation is the first in a set of narratives in Genesis that biblical scholars call the “primeval history,” which also includes the accounts of Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, their temptation and Fall, Cain and Abel, the Great Flood, and the Tower of Babel. Together, they form the framework within which the entire Hebrew and the Christian Bible is set, by establishing what kind of world we live in and why, what our human condition is, and thus, the state of our relation to God who created the world. 

All this though also means that these passages are not read in isolation. Just as these narratives form the foundational framework to the rest of the Bible, the full understanding of these narratives are calibrated and re-calibrated by subsequent books in the Bible and beyond. What I mean is, when some key terms or ideas in these narratives are referenced or quoted in the other passages of the Bible, or even by doctrines outside it, this in turn refines, or elaborates these ideas that remained ambiguous or undeveloped in the original narratives. Here’s just one set of examples from the account of God creating the world. In Genesis, God speaks into the Darkness to bring forth the Light; then, in the book of Isaiah, God declares, “I form the Light, and I create the Darkness, I the LORD do all these things.” Then, the Gospel of John identifies the Greek idea of the Logos, the rational principle underlying all of Reality, with the Word of God in Genesis that was spoken forth to create the world. Then, by the early 3rd century A.D., the doctrine of Creatio ex nihilo became a core tenet for Judaism and Christianity. This doctrine states that God created the world from nothing—that is, God created all things, so that there was no pre-existent matter out of which God made the world. Now, that last bit was one possible way that creation account in Genesis could’ve been interpreted, if it was taken by itself, so Creatio ex nihilo clarified this ambiguity in Genesis. 

And in this way, the Bible is rather like an immense hypertext document, where each passage is like a webpage full of hyper-links. The key terms or ideas in one passage of the Bible are often expanded, clarified, and developed elsewhere, beyond that passage itself, and to some extent, are still being developed. This is because according to Christianity, though the Bible has multiple human authors, spread over a thousand years, they were all inspired and moved by one source: God. And Christians believe that God continues to speak to us—and the first season of this podcast tried to present a preliminary understanding of what we mean by that. Thus, for Christianity, our understanding of these passages can develop and mature through time, while remaining rooted to what they originally conveyed, because the Spirit of God that spoke to their authors continues to speak to the generations that follow after. It’s like a pupil continuing to build upon what she has learned so far—though of course, that doesn’t mean that she won’t ignore her teacher now and then, or even become lost for a while.

And so, from the Christian perspective, her journey is what we will be partaking as we explore the first set of narratives in Genesis—the “primeval history” of the world. And it won’t be an easy journey; these narratives seem to be at such odds with our modern knowledge of the world, from science and history, that many of us today are at a loss as to what these stories can mean for us. For this, we will need to grasp how these narratives would’ve been understood by the ancient readers, as well as how the ideas they posed are clarified, refined or expanded by subsequent developments, so that we may then translate them, so to speak, to our day. 

So, let’s begin with the very first narrative that began it all. Creation.

[ pendulum ]

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” so opens the book of Genesis. Now, the original Hebrew rendering makes it ambiguous as to whether this opening is a separate statement, or a clause leading to the next verse. But, either way, this first verse still presents the same idea: God created the entire cosmos. The phrase in this verse, “the heavens and the earth” is the Hebrew way of saying, “everything there is,” as there was no specific word in that language that meant “everything there is,” such as say, “the universe,” or “all of existence.”

It is from the second verse that we are presented with the specifics of the account of Creation. It depicts the primeval beginning of the world as formless and void, with “darkness” upon the fathomless depths of “water,” and the Breath—or the Spirit—of God blowing upon that water. And then, God speaks, “Let there be Light.” And there was Light. God then separates that light from darkness, calling the light, “day,” and the darkness, “night.” This was the “first” day

And creation continues for six such “days,” with each day, God speaking again to bring forth yet another part of the world into existence. On the second day, God speaks, bringing forth a dome that separates the fathomless water into two—water that is “above,” and water that is “below.” And this dome is the “sky,” or “heaven.” On the third day, God speaks, so that water under the sky gathers into one place, and dry ground appears, forming the “sea” and the “land.” God then speaks again so that the land brings forth “seed-bearing” plants and vegetation.

On the fourth day, God speaks to bring forth the “lights,” to fill the sky, and these become the sun, moon, and the stars. On the fifth day, God speaks, so that water brings forth living things, from the great monsters of the deep, to the swarms of creatures in the sea, and birds also begin to fly across the sky. Then, on the sixth day, God speaks so that the land brings forth living things that move, from wild animals, to livestock. Then God speaks once more to create the first human beings, declaring that they will bear the image of their Creator.

And thus, according to Genesis, the heavens and the earth were created in their vast array. And with the work of Creation complete, God rests on the seventh day. 

Yet, it is immediately apparent that this account, while compelling, differs from our modern scientific accounts of how the world came to be. 

In contemporary science, the Big Bang cosmology explains the existence of the universe. This model is now held by scientists, more or less “universally”—pun not intended. It may come as a surprise though that this Big Bang model resonates far more with the Genesis Creation account than the previous scientific models that are now rejected. Those stated that the universe always existed, whereas the Big Bang model states that the universe has a finite age; in a sense, it began. Science now describes the initial state of the universe as so intensely dense, compact, and heated, that the current laws of physics do not operate, and space and time has no meaning. From this state, the universe went through a rapid, initial expansion—an explosion, and hence the term, “Big Bang.” As it expanded, the laws of physics as we know it came into operation, space and time emerged, and the universe cooled down enough to form elementary particles, and eventually, stars and galaxies. And all of this… resonates with the idea of Creation; stars, matter, energy, even space and time, came into being from an initial event, which as an added bonus, was basically an explosion of Light. “Let there be Light,” indeed.

But, beyond that, our account diverges greatly from Genesis. The most obvious is the timespan. We estimate that the initial Big Bang event happened 13.8 billion years ago. The first stars formed 12 billion years ago, and our sun is 4.6 billion years old. The planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, Life on earth emerged around 4.2 billion years ago, and 100 million years ago, the dinosaurs roamed the earth. And human beings as a species appeared 250 000 years ago. Genesis seems to say that all of that happened in mere six days, around 6000 years ago. 

The sequence of what happened is a problem too. According to Genesis, the sky, land and sea, and even seed-bearing plants were created before the sun, moon, and the stars. And in Genesis, God creates land plants, then sea creatures and birds, and then, land animals. But, fossil records suggest that earliest life was in water, they weren’t plants, and flying creatures appeared after land animals. And we aren’t even going into the theory of evolution, which raises a different set of issues altogether that we’ll look into in some other episode. 

So, what are we to think of Genesis in the light of modern scientific discoveries?  

[ pendulum ]

However, Christians have been raising questions regarding the Genesis Creation account, long, long before the emergence of modern science—to say nothing of the Jewish tradition. Take the issue of the six-day timespan of Creation. Way back in the 2nd and 3rd century, early Church fathers were raising the point that the sun was not created until the fourth day, and that means that each “day” in the Genesis account may not be 24-hour days. Figures like Justin the Martyr and Irenaeus noted that the 2nd letter of Peter in the New Testament Bible cautions the Church that, “with the Lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like one day.” (2 Peter 3:8). Someone like Origen was more direct, arguing that “days,” in Genesis simply cannot be 24-hour days. And I’ve already mentioned Augustine in the first season, whose works in the early 5th century form the foundation of Christian theology for Western Europe. Augustine not only rejected the six-day timespan of Creation, but argued further that the Genesis account is not describing a chronological sequence of Creation—that is, it’s not telling us which order in time things were created. He believed instead that God created all things—including time—instantaneously, and Genesis is describing the logical order of Creation. 

Others who followed disagreed to different degrees. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas, one of the most important Roman Catholic thinkers, believed that there was a chronological order to Creation. But, he also concluded that Christianity has no definitive position on whether or not the timespan of Creation was six-24 hour days, or what was created in which order. The Protestant reformers in the 16th century, like Martin Luther and John Calvin, believed that God did take six 24-hour days to create the world, because that was the simplest reading of Genesis. But, they also conceded that there are enough uncertainties in how to understand the Creation account, that other Christians can disagree.

The point here is that Christians have been raising these questions not because of the perceived conflict between Genesis and science; the Creation narrative itself has always posed such questions for Christianity. And in the background of these questions was the issue of how to best understand Genesis. Christians all agreed that it teaches that God created all things; but, beyond that, they differed on what the specifics of the account were really saying. What does the “day” mean? What does it mean to say that the world was initially formless, empty, fathomless depths of… water? Was there time then? What really is the Light that God created in the first day, when there were no sun, moon, or the stars? What is the water “above,” that was separated from the sea when God created the sky? And does that “sky” include the starry heavens, or just up to where the clouds are? What is the “dry land,” that appears from water, and the plants that this land brings forth? What does it mean to say that humanity was created in God’s image?

Some Christians, like Origen thought that along with the foundational teaching that God created the world, Genesis is presenting a symbolic description of the spiritual journey we must undertake toward God. Many others, like Augustine or Aquinas, drew upon philosophical concepts to understand parts of the account; for example, they proposed that “water” represented formless matter, and “land” the primary matter that has form, or perhaps the Aristotelian element of Earth. 

But, the most significant idea for our purpose is the idea of “accommodation.” To understand this idea, imagine a father walking with his child. Now, he can walk much faster than the child, leaving her far behind, but he slows his pace, takes smaller steps, in order to walk alongside her. The father is “accommodating” his steps to his child. Or, say, he’s making a video game, and he’s coding a complex set of instructions for its A.I. to follow, and his child asks what he’s doing. Now, he can talk about the latest machine-learning algorithms, or coding languages, or how these codes are processed at the level of hardware. But, she won’t understand any of that. He says instead that he’s “teaching” the computer how to play a game. That’s the answer that his child can understand, and more to the point, that’s what she was really asking about. Again, he’s “accommodating” his answer to his child. 

Likewise, according to Christianity, God “accommodates” to humanity; when God interacts with human beings, God speaks in ways that humans can understand and respond to. You can even think of this as the other side of the ideas that we’ve explored in the first season; God is Reality; and what we can say about Reality —which is Infinite—is always limited; and so, all that we do say are simply the best we can manage with the language and understanding currently available to us. But, that’s when we are trying to speak; what if Reality is Who that speaks to us? Well, we’re still limited. So, Reality—God—speaks to us the truths that we can gasp with our current limitations. And this idea of “accommodation” is a core principle of Christianity; after all, Jesus Christ Himself is God accommodating to our level by becoming a human being. And in regard to the Bible, this means that when God spoke to the human authors of the Bible, God communicated at a level, and in a language, that people living in that time could grasp. Again, remember the earlier example of the father’s answer to his child asking, “what’re you doing?”   

And in regard to Genesis, every Christian, from Augustine, to Aquinas, to Calvin —the early Church fathers, medieval theologians, to Protestant reformers— all believed that the primeval narratives, and especially the Creation account, were “accommodated” to human understanding. The question was: which part of it was God accommodating to human limitations, and in which way. Augustine thought that the six-day chronological narrative was God accommodating to our difficulty in understanding instantaneous Creation beyond time. Calvin thought it was when Genesis called the Moon, a “great light,” when the stars are in fact, greater than the moon. But, God was accommodating the people living in biblical times, for they didn’t have the astronomical knowledge Calvin now had, and more to the point, the Moon is a greater source of light for people living on Earth. 

But, all this raises a very important question. It wasn’t us living in our modern age, or the Protestant reformers, or the Medievals, or even the early Church that God spoke to, when Genesis was being written. Who were the people that lived then? What did they believe? How did they see the world? What were their limitations, in language, knowledge, or understanding? Because the Genesis narratives are God accommodating to them, not to us. Nor to Augustine, nor Calvin, I might add. Their role—and ours—is to receive the narratives that was accommodated to people who wrote Genesis, and to refine, expand, and develop our understanding to the new limits that God is accommodating to, when God speaks to our generation.

Now, who wrote Genesis is a complicated question. Traditionally, it was believed that Moses wrote Genesis, along with four other books in the Hebrew Bible— Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. But, both the Jews and the Christians have always known that these books, at least the version we have now, were written later; after all, they include the part where Moses dies—which would an odd thing for him to write. Biblical scholars think the version we have now was compiled together around 500 years before the time of Jesus; but of course, we also know it likely drew upon older written records and spoken traditions—from the time of Moses, if we’re to believe the traditions. But, because we have no access to those, the scholars can’t say what those were. What they did was to reconstruct the likely groups of people who were involved in the making of the version we have now, and what each group brought to the project. But, what we’re interested is the content of that version, not how it came about.

Because again, for Christianity, whether it was Moses, or the later authors, they were all inspired and moved by the same, singular source: God. And when God speaks, God accommodates to our limitations, whether it is Moses, or the authors living 500 years before Jesus. And in the case of Genesis, both those authors, and even Moses to a large extent, lived with a certain view of the world.

[ Background music ] 

And their world was where things around them meant something quite different than what they mean to us. Where “water” was more than water, and “land” was more than land. Where the sky was a dome, keeping out boundless water above, and earth stood upon pillars rising from fathomless depth. Where great monsters stirred in the deep, and within a seed of a tree, an entire world of life slept. Where sun, moon, and the stars seemed divine, and their courses above the heavens directed the destiny of the cosmos.   

And to that world, God… spoke

What that was, which is told in the Creation account in Genesis… is for the next episode to explore. 

So, please join me next week, as we explore Genesis 1, Creation. 

If you enjoy this content and want to support this series, please follow, subscribe, and share. And for those of you so moved, you will be able to support through Patreon, once I get around to setting up that account. 

Thank you for listening, and until next time...

I will be waiting, here.  

The place of Genesis narratives in Christianity
Genesis Creation account and modern scientific cosmology
Questions Christians raised about Genesis Creation account
God "accommodates" to human understanding